Dogelang – A Python with Haskell Syntax - <AUTHOR> http://pyos.github.io/dg/ <comment><USER2> Haskell's syntax without Haskell's type system sounds like a nightmare. The type system is what makes me at least vaguely confident that the incomprehensible string of symbols that make up a good chunk of Haskell expressions are at least close to being correct.

(And to be clear: I use Haskell professionally and love it - but the syntax is _not_ why most people use Haskell).

<comment><USER3> Did the tagline "Slow. Stupid. Absolutely adorable." not clue you in that this is a joke?

<comment><USER4> The name alone should be enough.

<comment><USER5> Why?, not a native English speaker, I looked up doge and it has no meaning, any tips for other meaning?

<comment><USER6> It's a meme:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_(meme)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_\(meme\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Id much rather have python syntax and Haskell semantic to get good parts of both!

<comment><USER8> One problem with Python's syntax, though, is that you can't have anonymous lambdas which span more than one line (unless perhaps you start using escapes, but that would miss the point).

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure what you mean by escapes, but you can use parentheses as block delimiters, "and" and "or" as a semicolon, and ternary operator for conditionals

        >>> f = lambda x: (
        ...   (
        ...     print('a') or
        ...     print('b')
        ...   ) if x % 2
        ...   else (
        ...     print('c') or
        ...     print('d')
        ...   )
        ... )
        >>> f(42)
        c
        d
        >>> f(43)
        a
        b

<comment><USER10> My God, man. My eyes!

That is strikingly hideous. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

<comment><USER11> A language that actually cares about functional programming.

<comment><USER12> Oh please. You can "do" functional programming just fine in Python. If it's longer than a line, give it a name. It's not hard and it makes the code more readable and easier to maintain.

<comment><USER11> I do most of my work in multi-paradigm languages–so it's not like they're specifically designed around the ergonomics of working with functional programming–but Python is probably the worst language that I have used that could reasonably say that it supports this style of work. It's like it actively _tries_ to make things strange and annoying to convince you to use other constructs (such as list comprehensions). Why can't I have a multiline lambda (…some things have no need for a name)? Why are all the functional methods free functions that take the list as the second parameter? Why was reduce arbitrarily excised from the list of built-in functions and put inside functools? Why can't I use a member function or operators as parameters without hacks like operators.__{operator_thats_a_reserved_word}__? Why do all the Python 3 functions return generators by default, when Python never really cared much about performance in the first place? It's just a death by a thousand cuts that always makes me regret even trying to do functional programming, and deep down I actually think the Python authors just don't want you do be doing it because they think it would lead to what they believe is difficult-to-understand code. Honestly, I think _even C++_ has better functional programming constructs than Python, even with its ugly-looking lambdas and lack of chaining, because <algorithm>'s extensiveness makes up for some of the language's warts.

<comment><USER8> In defense of Python, at least it supports closures that easily refer to variables higher up in the stack, whereas in C++ you always have to think about the lifetime of variables. Your other points I agree with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there a Python with Haskell syntax (or at least, much less verbose than regular Python..) that can have little a Haskell static typing, as a treat?

<comment><USER14> Nothing comes to mind. Most attempts to introduce static typing into Python only do that, and not much more. Seq is an example:

[https://github.com/seq-lang/seq](https://github.com/seq-lang/seq)

I think you might be interested in looking at multi-paradigm languages that use static/inferred typing and combine the functional and imperative paradigms. Some worth taking a look at might be OCaml, Nim, and F Sharp. Nim leans more towards Python, OCaml and F# lean more towards Haskell.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_\(programming_language\))

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_Sharp_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_Sharp_\(programming_language\))

<comment><USER15> Ocaml is really good with nice tooling like merlin. Compiles to native as well. There's reasonml for people who favour js syntax but I have come to like ocaml syntax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> On a serious note, I've long wondered what python would feel like with haskell-style "whitespace" to call/partially call functions. It feels like it wouldn't be super difficult to get working; as far as I can think of "identifier ws identifier" is always currently a syntax error? Maybe a toy python project someday...

<comment><USER17> Python has enough vararg functions to make this not doable without coming up with some special-case syntax. There's a reason you don't have varargs in the Haskell world--currying isn't a special case, but rather happens any time you have multiple arguments. A three-argument function with type (A -> B -> C -> D) is actually syntactic sugar for a function that takes an A and returns...

a function that takes a B and returns...

a function that takes a C and returns...

a value of type D.

This is determinable by just looking at the number of arguments provided. But a variadic function, in a world with currying, would be a function that takes an argument, and returns...well, it might be a function to take another argument, and it might be the actual computation.

Even if we didn't have currying, we can't just use whitespace in a Python-like language. We don't know if (print) is actually a function call, or just referencing the function object (perhaps to pass it to 'map' or something). Your syntax needs to distinguish between those two cases.

<comment><USER18> There are varargs in Haskell, but they aren't as natural as in Python; and usually rely on various amounts of type level trickery.

Implementing a vararg printf in Haskell is a popular enough exercise.

A relatively common examples in practice is the testing library QuickCheck: your properties (ie tests) can take any number of arguments that the library fills with samples inputs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> All the performance of Python with all of the readability of Haskell ;)

<comment><USER20> what's <$> so unreadable <*> about haskell?

<comment><USER21> The learning curve is pretty intense, but I do want to say that the operators you use here are actually _pretty great_ for readability after you learn them.

I don't know if that makes them worthwhile, but I always find them a breath of fresh air.

<comment><USER18> A lot of Haskell's more controversial constructs are about being able to hide plumbing.

Applicative plumbing is especially easy in structure, so removing it from you doesn't hide any complexity from the experience programmer. It's easy to reconstruct the plumbing on the fly in your mind, if you want to reason about it.

Other tools like lenses or arrows take a lot longer for a lot of people to internalize like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been wanting this for a while, mainly because I often find myself writing long function composition chains that end up being a mess of parentheses. Python is good at encouraging functional style but sometimes it ends up being too much to be readable with the normal syntax.

<comment><USER23> Python is as good at encouraging functional style as a massive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction is good at encouraging world peace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm a big fan/proponent of Hy ([http://hylang.org](http://hylang.org)), a Lisp built onto Python. Even going to the somewhat irresponsible extent of using it in production!

</comment><comment><USER25> Another language that is similar, but with more an ML syntax is MLite ([https://www.t3x.org/mlite/index.html](https://www.t3x.org/mlite/index.html)). Like this, it's an interpreter with dynamic typing, and probably not that useful, but it is fun to play around with functional programming with.

</comment><comment><USER26> > A programming language that compiles to CPython bytecode, much like Scala > compiles to JVM's.

I'm wondering if the CPython bytescode is stable though. Is the Python bytecode spec managed independently from the language version (like JVM) so this kind of approach won't break when a new Python is released?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm not sure what's funnier: that it exists or that some people still haven't heard of Poe's law. Or did a sense of humor pervasively roll on its back, cross its arms and legs, and replace their eyes for X's?

</comment><comment><USER28> Reminds a bit of Clio lang [0].

Clio transpiles to JavaScript and appears to target microservices or serverless architecture.

[https://clio-lang.org/](https://clio-lang.org/)

</comment><comment><USER29> So, the worst of two worlds? Nice. Dogelang indeed.

</comment><comment><USER30> How about a Rust or a Go with Python syntax?

<comment><USER31> [https://github.com/mystor/slag](https://github.com/mystor/slag) (Won't actually work today)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Nice, but after it compiles to CPython bytecode, it really ought to transpile to Javascript.

<comment><USER14> PureScript already has the Haskell -> Javascript niche covered:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PureScript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PureScript)

<comment><USER33> Why using a separate language if GHCJS is already good enough?

<comment><USER14> According to the creator of PureScript:

"Solutions at the time included various attempts to compile Haskell to JavaScript while preserving its semantics (Fay, Haste, GHCJS), but I was interested to see how successful I could be by approaching the problem from the other side - attempting to keep the semantics of JavaScript, while enjoying the syntax and type system of a language like Haskell."

[https://leanpub.com/purescript/read#leanpub-auto-about- the-a...](https://leanpub.com/purescript/read#leanpub-auto-about-the-author)

<comment><USER33> It's a good reason for the author of the language, and for anyone who's interested in designing programming languages. However, I often wonder why people in the industry promote it as a great choice for developers who are looking for a "Haskell for frontend", instead of recommending GHCJS. I do understand why Elm is recommended instead of Haskell for simplicity reasons, but PureScript is neither simpler nor (presumably, if I'm not missing something) conceptually more valuable (i.e. bringing refreshingly new ideas) than GHC Haskell.

<comment><USER21> Purescript does have algebraic effects and row polymorphism generally, which Haskell does not AFAIK (I don't do as much Haskell as I would like so I may be wrong.)

<comment><USER33> Algebraic effects are not part of the language implementation, but there are libraries like fused-effects[1] that implement them. Row polymorphism has been proposed a few years ago [2], but as with any community effort, the timeline and possibility of the actual implementation depends on the amount of attention put into it instead of some other (probably important, too) work.

[1]: [https://github.com/fused-effects/fused- effects](https://github.com/fused-effects/fused-effects) [2]: [https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc- proposals/pull/180](https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/180)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wish they used the famous Doge meme image for the mascot.

</comment><comment><USER35> super cool. if anything else it exposes haskellers sense of humor

</comment><comment><USER36> Finally, I have found my language.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you grow a new SaaS business? - <AUTHOR> I have started a business for my university project (link: https://OrderHappy.uk). I am looking now to grow my business customer base but I'm having trouble doing so. I've been having to devote more time than I'd like to marketing (I'd say a 70:30 split between marketing and developing) yet I'm still struggling to attract new users. I'd love to hear how you guys have grown your businesses and traps and pitfalls that you've fallen into. <comment><USER2> This is an old interview with GrubHub founder on mixergy but it's right up your alley with OrderHappy. He talks about what he did initially.

Selling to restaurants is super hard.

[https://mixergy.com/interviews/grubhub-michael-evans- intervi...](https://mixergy.com/interviews/grubhub-michael-evans-interview/)

Check out StartUpsForTheRestOfUs.com if you haven't already.

@DHH Startup School Talk [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the links, the interview was really interesting and enlightened me a bit more about how much work there is to do

<comment><USER2> This might just be your first go at it. A semi-successful university project that you unplug and move on to your next idea that is in a better market. Or you might be able to make it work. Restaurants are an interesting space, but really hard. Don't be too married to this idea though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I 100% get what you mean. That's why I've tried to market Order Happy at all businesses that are selling products such as clothing stores or DIY stores ect. but I'm struggling at selling that point. Who knows though in the future it may not even be an ordering system!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As someone who's had one failed SaaS and one that is on track to be a success, the biggest takeaways have been:

1\. Make sure there is significant a market for your service 2\. Get funding 3\. Expect things to take twice as long and cost twice as much 4\. Talk to your customers constantly and don't be afraid to ask them to pay 5\. Go back to point 1 and double, triple, quadruple check there is a significant market for your service

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, I have one question, where would you possibly start with point 2? What sort of stuff did you do that helped you achieve this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> can you start over? write the app that does 1 simple stupid thing that adds a lot of value or unique value. then go all out marketing that thing like its the latest iPhone release. embed your marketing in your target market's daily lives. get lucky, often. good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> I have some bad news for you. For a solo founder, a 70:30 marketing:development mix is on the low side. At this point, unless you're getting a financially backed feature request from a majority of your contacts, you should really be spending almost all your time on sales/marketing. When I say "financially backed feature request", I mean that a majority of your contacts have said if you build $x, they'll pay you $y for $z years.

I checked out your website and I'd argue that your problem is bigger than SAAS marketing. You won't be able to keep restaurants signed up unless you deliver customers to them. At the same time, you won't be able to attract customers unless you have a good set of restaurants.

The restaurant industry is hard to reach, but your best bet with them is to fuck marketing and go straight into sales. To this end, change your website so it's specifically about your city.

Go into places outside their rush hours and ask to speak to a manager. Make your pitch. Ask yourself what went right and what went wrong. Repeat for ~ 3-6 months. In the beginning, you'll do 80% of the talking, but with a few months of experience, you'll do about 20% of the talking. Ironically, that will mean that you're getting good at sales, but you won't believe that until you're already good at sales.

Be prepared to take a major loss on the first 10 businesses you sign up. Good restaurateurs are enamoured with change, yet they're highly risk averse. At first, they won't want to partner with you unless you eat 100% of the risk and increase their margin on sales booked through you. If I were in your shoes, I'd expect to pay my first 10 customers 10% of each order total extra plus agree to pay 100% of the customers' bills when my app fucks up (or they think I did). You'll also find that it's easier to get a 'no' out of a venture capitalist than an FOH focused restaurateur. You'll have better luck hearing a firm no from a head chef, but if you ever hear yes from a head chef, apply to Y Combinator ASAP. You have product/market fit...:)

As far as straight up marketing, at this point, paying for media (ie - advertising) looks like it would be a waste. If I were you, I'd spend your ad budget when you have at least 20 restaurants signed up and want to get them some customers. At least then you'll have an easier time coming up with and testing a hypothesis about what will trigger your users to order food through your app.

I'd focus on earned media (ie - journalists). I don't know enough about your business to suggest a hook, but young entrepreneur are usually an editor's dream on slow news days. The problem is that kind of coverage tends to be long on 'aw shucks' and short on converting actual customers. If you tell me more about your city, its local media landscape and about some of the best reporters, I can maybe give you some better pitch ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for taking the time to reply. I signed up my first customer by offering them the service at an extreme discount but I can't seem to tempt anybody else with this approach. I feel like I definitely need to work on my sales as I have no experience in that area and I think that's what's weighing me down. I've spent the last few days working on a referral feature as the site(s) bring in about 100 users a day and I want to try and capitalise on this high amount of traffic whilst it's still strong. I'm not sure what my next steps from there are however.

The company is based in Manchester (uk) but even there I can't seem to build any traction, I haven't yet spoken to any media/journalists however as I wouldn't even know how to approach them!

<comment><USER5> This will hopefully make you laugh, but I know quite a bit about Manchester. Unfortunately, my knowledge comes from being a post-punk fan/artist with an unhealthy obsession with Factory Records. So, while I know quite a bit about Manchester, it all tends to be knowledge that would have been useful in the mid-late 70s.

Specifically, I have a great pitch that would work on Tony Wilson. Unfortunately, he's no longer among the living and I fear that pitching a dead journalist would bring the wrong kinds of attention. :)

I've done some googling and I've noticed a fellow named Simon Binns tends to write some articles on Manchester's food scene. I like him for you as he seems to be an unabashed fan of Manchester. Consider this article:

[https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/food- drink-...](https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink- news/wood-manchester-review-telegraph-menu-13909395)

If you research him, you'll find other similar articles where the man's love of your city seems to shine through. Like I said, I like him.

This article has a shit byline (by I Love MCR) that won't help you craft a specific pitch. But, it follows the trend set by Simon Binns.

[https://ilovemanchester.com/2018/01/08/formidable-food- criti...](https://ilovemanchester.com/2018/01/08/formidable-food-critic-jay- rayner-raves-manchester-restaurants-bars.aspx)

I'm honestly quite happy to see the cheerleading!

I watched a couple of interviews with Manchester restaurateurs and, fashion wise, I noticed a couple of cats who would not look out of place at a Buzzcocks show in the late 70s. Fashion is fashion so it's hard to judge personalities based on clothing, but honestly, they look like DIY'ers.

From a marketing point of view, the do it yourself ethos works wonderfully in pitches, especially if your genesis story aligns. Based on the Binns article I linked to and other articles I've read on him, I have a good pitch in mind. But, we've got to be honest as journalists can spot bullshitters from miles away.

What is your genesis story??

PS - my email is in my profile. Feel free to reach out - I used to be something of a journalist and I've read tons of pitches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Learn how to sell.

Watch wolf of wall street for reference.

<comment><AUTHOR> Watching it for the 18th time right now, I think the mistake I'm making is not selling enough of nothing for something!</comment></comment>


Awesome "3D" projection software, emulate multiple screens on rectangular boxes - <AUTHOR> http://ixagon.se/new/cases/european-spallation-source-exhibition/

<comment><USER2> Pretty darn cool, I must say. 3D video projection, just like raycasting in video games, with a real-world application.</comment>


Ask HN: CIA is spying on you. Now what? - <AUTHOR> Knowing (assuming) that CIA has the capability to and in fact spies on US and non-US citizens alike on a massive scale, what do we do? Are there effective/practical means to resist/subvert such attempts? To take the government to task? What if anything will this knowledge change in your life? <comment><USER2> The chances of the CIA getting interested in what you do with your time is very small but the leak does shed light on some strong exploits AND tools, and it might be farfetched to say this, but if Wikileaks got their hands on those details, then someone else besides them possibly has them too. If the CIA has the ability to make those tools by utilizing unknown exploits then the chances of someone else being able to do the same are almost certain, the best recourse is to call on the CIA to share the exploits with the public or at least the developers so that they can get them fixed.

This is huge especially for corporate espionage, consider the possibility of a Russian/Chinese state-linked company spying on American companies to get an advantage, another example would be Russian O&G companies planting bad designs in order to cause disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to make other companies look bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know of a single instance where CIA (not subcontractors) was held accountable for any action? Secret detention, targeted killing, lying under oath? I think this is huge from public interest standpoint, couldn't care less about corporate espionage.</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Digital Ocean IP addresses largely blacklisted by MIPSpace - <AUTHOR>

Advice: don't run a mail server at Digital Ocean.
I transferred my science site and mailing list to Digital Ocean, and a few weeks ago found it suddenly overtaken by a growing block-range blacklist by MIPSpace. Much of Digital Ocean's IP address range is now blacklisted by MIPSpace, which certainly degrades my ability to send mail.
Digital Ocean's reply to this:
<comment>----- At this time we are not sure if we can get this block removed. Mipspace does not email abuse and anyone can say an ip is bad and eventually they block the entire range.
At this time only a small % of our ip space is effected, nyc1 is the only location we offer that has less than 10% of all ip space on this list.. Personally, I would move to nyc2 if possible and reconsider who you email and what you email. They don't even follow quarantine removal processes. We're sorry we cannot accommodate your needs but will be more than happy to refer you to services that can relay to almost everyone in the world. </comment><comment>-----
So on the one hand I understand their position; MIPSpace is a bad actor from what I've read. On the other hand Digital Ocean are in the business of renting IP addresses, with the implicit understanding that they are responsible for ensuring that this sort of block-level blacklisting isn't happening for addresses they rent out.
It is a frustrating situation all round for people like myself, who carefully manage our email and play by the rules, to be stepped on in this way by a combination of parties and bad incentives. </comment><comment><USER2> If you care about e-mail delivery, you won't send it from a VPS or virtual server anywhere. You'll have the same problem anywhere it's easy for someone with the same shared IP space to set up an account with a prepaid or stolen credit card and send a bunch of spam before being caught.

Use SendGrid or Mandrill. Mandrill is free for up to 12,000 e-mails per month then it's just pocket change per thousand. You can point Sendmail at their SMTP server and your apps will send mail through that without any code changes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Many VPS type things have ended up on blacklists; they're increasingly seen as just another version of consumer-level dynamic IP space, like dialup or cablemodem IP ranges.

Amazon's solution has been to provide an outgoing email-relay service, SES, that people can use instead of sending email directly from AWS IP addresses. Sort of the cloud version of relaying mail through your ISP's SMTP server rather than mailing directly. SES makes an effort to keep down outgoing spam, so it stays a "clean" outgoing mail route: [http://aws.amazon.com/ses/](http://aws.amazon.com/ses/)

<comment><USER4> yes many cloud server providers now use this method. Godaddy has been using this for shared hosting accounts , vps and dedicated servers. they have a limit on outgoing email and it prevents users from abusing the services and use them for spamming.

Digital Ocean can do something similar to relay messages through their gateway and thus preventing email spam issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What are your options for running a mailserver cheaply?</comment>


How to Bootstrap a Rust Web API from Scratch - <AUTHOR> https://www.lpalmieri.com/posts/2020-08-09-zero-to-production-3-how-to-bootstrap-a-new-rust-web-api-from-scratch/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here! This is the third chapter of Zero To Production, an in-progress book on API development with Rust.

Chapter 3 is where the actual implementation of our email newsletter project (the driving example) begins.

We take off by copy-pasting the "Hello World!" example on actix-web's website and then we pick it apart to understand what each component is doing (HttpServer, App, Route, actix_rt, etc.). We slowly reshape it into an health check endpoint and then spend the remaining 60% or so of the article looking at how to write a black-box integration test for it.

I haven't published the entire Chapter 3 - it has been split in two parts to keep the publishing cadence (once every two weeks). The second half will come out on August 23rd and tackle database migrations, how to check side-effects in integration tests as well as actix-web's extractors. At the end of it we should finally be able to onboard new subscribers to the newsletter via a form.

Enjoy!</comment>


Pulse app goes free, gets $800,000 in VC - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/technology/15pulse.html

<comment><USER2> "The company will also announce that it has raised $800,000 in venture capital, the first step in moving along the path from building an app to running a profitable business."

Funny, I would have thought the first step would be not to start giving away a successful app for free.

I'll be watching with interest to see what their plan for revenue is. I thought Pulse was kinda neat but rather an inefficient way to browse for news. I suspect anything advertising related will just accentuate that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Am I getting my 2.99 back? Or is the free version ad supported? In the process of trying to get more users, the free move might alienate their paying customers

<comment><USER4> Meaning you will delete the app you paid $2.99 for in protest?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs>

<comment><USER5> Yeah, you basically are screwed. You paid $2.99 to have no ads, now you are out $2.99 and will presumably see ads. Bait and switch, basically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> when I read the title I thought it was talking about <http://pulseapp.com/> which I could see raising $800k ... but a news reader? I don't find pulse to be THAT amazing.

</comment><comment><USER7> They lost me at "Older entrepreneurs..." Not so much because of the blatant age discrimination, which is probably just the reporter's fault, as much as it was a reminder that what they're doing is kind of pedestrian, and will likely be eclipsed soonish by html 5.

</comment><comment><USER8> As someone about to get into this space, I didn't realize that personalized reading was heating up so good. I suppose that competition is a good thing, and of all the apps listed in the article (Flipboard, Zinio, Pulse), I think that using the web as a platform is a competitive advantage for us, but damn. How is this the first I've heard of this?

If this is seen as too self-serving, feel free to mod down, but I have to ask, does anybody else use Pulse, or the apps mentioned? What do you like/dislike about them?

<comment><USER9> Flipboard is pretty good.

I've also used 'Early Edition' which fetches your RSS feed into a newspaper like view. Again, its a really nice option for reading RSS feeds. Now I just pick up my iPad and flip through the first few pages of news rather than always trying to bring the Unread count to 0 on Google Reader.

<comment><USER10> Seconded. Flipboard is directly responsible for me spending ~$20/month less on magazines. There's a local (motorcycle) magazine which I've bought every (2 weekly) issue for ~12 years, which I haven't bought a single copy of since I installed Flipboard. All the "I've got 10 or 15 minutes spare in a cafe lingering over a coffee or two" reading needs are better met by Flipboard (for me) than AMCN Two Wheels and New Scientist and various other magazines I'd occasionally buy to fill in time.

I don't think it's "the future of print media", but I think it's certainly indicative of one direction the future of print media might lie...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What can we do to corral digital advertising? - <AUTHOR> After reading this story[1] I'm basically sick to my stomach of digital advertising. It's a topic that's often discussed on HN (i.e., digital advertising) in the context of "I hate it" or "I wish they'd stop tracking me", etc. But what are some actionable steps to take (e.g., software to build, educational materials) that I/we can create/make to help fight the digital advertising beast? Because I don't imagine this is going to stop anytime soon - if anything, I imagine it'll just get worse.<p>[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/business/media/fever-advertisements-medicine-clorox.html <comment><USER2> Please sue under the Americans with Disabilities Act: Ads trigger my micro- seizures when they move, flash, grow, refresh, change, scroll, evolve, pop-up, shout...</comment>


Powershell terminal sucks. Is there a better choice? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/10/readers_corner_powershell_terminal/ <comment><USER2> Funny enough, PowerShell was supposed to be a command line shell equivalent for Windows. Turned out to be just a scripting language to replace Windows Scripting Host.</comment>


Judge Posner decries "excessive" copyright and software patent protections - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/judge-decries-excessive-copyright-and-software-patent-protections/ <comment><USER2> If you're not familiar with Judge Posner, you should be. He's been a judge in the Court of Appeals (a set of courts right below the Supreme Court) since 1981. In addition to being a judge, he is the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century. He's only the only judge on the 7th circuit to reliably send clerks to the Supreme Court (indeed, Lawrence Lessig was one of those clerks). In short, he's an extremely acclaimed and well regarded jurist. And to boot, his opinions are a pleasure to read (<http://www.projectposner.org/case/>) and sometimes quite biting (<http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/tmp/LZ19Y7FG.pdf>).

<comment><USER3> That PDF link is a 404.

<comment><USER4> It's Gonzalez-Servin v. Ford Motor Co. wherein Posner chastised the plaintiffs' attorneys for ignoring certain unfavorable case law. The published opinion contains images of an ostrich and a lawyer burying their heads in the sand.

[http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate- courts/ca7/11-...](http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate- courts/ca7/11-1665/11-1665-2011-11-23-opinion-2011-11-23.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Posner's positions, and the frank and open manner with which he expresses them, are a much needed breath of fresh air from a legal system that is all too esoteric. Especially with regard to patents.

Though not directly related to the position Posner takes in his most recent blog post, it's ironic to consider the fact that patents are filed not by the inventors themselves, but lawyers who represent them. To me, that begs the question of whether or not "someone of ordinary skill in the art" could actually replicate the invention disclosed in any given patent. In reality, depending on the invention, it doesn't seem likely that the inventor could even replicate her own invention using solely her patent as a guide. This is a result of patents that are too vague, too general, and too far removed from the actual technology they purport to disclose.

In his recent writing, Posner has chosen to make the point that companies use either defunct or trivial technology to halt innovation through patent litigation. Recently, the culprit has been Apple, but Apple is, of course, not alone. In the fight against patent bullying, Posner's conclusions are, for the most part, right on target.

<comment><USER6> > Posner's positions, and the frank and open manner with which he expresses > them, are a much needed breath of fresh air from a legal system that is all > too esoteric. Especially with regard to patents.

To be fair, Posner is also a poster-boy for judicial activism. Much of what seems "esoteric" in law is actually the attempt to give effect to fine distinctions made in statutes and in previous cases. If you ride roughshod over all that and decide cases according to sweeping principles, it's much easier to be open and succinct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The full piece is an interesting read on the Becker-Posner blog as well - [http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/do-patent-and- copy...](http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/do-patent-and-copyright- law-restrict-competition-and-creativity-excessively-posner.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Posner is an appeals court judge, but last summer he heard _Apple v. Motorola_ while he was temporarily sitting as a trial judge. He dismissed the claims of both companies "with prejudice" which means the case cannot be filed again elsewhere.

From his opinion (which really opened my eyes to the inanity of patent litigation):

 _In its latest written and oral submissions Apple attempts what I told its legal team at a pretrial conference I would not let it do in the liability trials then envisaged: turn the case into an Apple versus Motorola popularity contest. Apple wanted me to allow into evidence media reports attesting to what a terrific product the iPhone is. I said I would not permit this because the quality of the iPhone (and of related Apple products, primarily the iPad) and consumers' regard for it have, so far as the record shows, nothing to do with the handful of patent claims that I had ruled presented triable issues of infringement. Apple's "feel good" theory does not indicate that infringement of these claims (if they were infringed) reduced Apple's sales or market share, or impaired consumer goodwill toward Apple products. Typical is the statement in Apple's brief of June 18 that "an Apple survey identified watching streaming videos from YouTube among the top ten planned activities for consumers using iPads in the United States." The '263 patent in issue in this litigation is not a claim to a monopoly of streaming video!_

 _Apple is complaining that Motorola's phones as a whole ripped off the iPhone as a whole. But Motorola's desire to sell products that compete with the iPhone is a separate harm—and a perfectly legal one—from any harm caused by patent infringement._

 _I note, amplifying earlier points, the absence of evidence that if Motorola is infringing the patent claims at issue, it is imposing a significant cost on Apple. Consider the '002, which Apple charges is infringed by Motorola's preventing partial obstruction of its smartphones' notification windows. There is no evidence, and it seems more than unlikely, that occasional partial obstruction would appreciably reduce the value of Motorola's smartphones to consumers—Apple didn't even bother to install a notification window on its devices until last year. Consider next the '949, which Apple contends is infringed by Motorola's enabling customers who buy a Motorola smartphone with a Kindle reader pre-installed to turn pages by tapping on the screen rather than by swiping a finger across it (which actually is more like turning pages than tapping is). Consider the '263, the realtime patent, alleged to be infringed by Motorola's adopting a method for avoiding glitches in "real time" communications (such as movies) that has not been shown to provide a superior experience to consumers than alternative, noninfringing realtime software or hardware or otherwise drive consumer demand for the iPhone. And consider the '647 (structural linking and detection), which also provides unproved consumer benefits._

Note the Judge was ruling on an injunction which "requires a plaintiff to demonstrate: (1) that it has suffered an irreparable injury; (2) that remedies available at law are inadequate to compensate for that injury; (3) that considering the balance of hardships between the plaintiff and defendant, a remedy in equity is warranted; and (4) that the public interest would not be disserved by a permanent injunction." eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, 547 U.S. 388 (2006)

[http://fortunebrainstormtech.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/6-2...](http://fortunebrainstormtech.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/6-22-opinion1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't know how the appointment of judges works beyond the local level where I vote. What would it take to get Posner appointed to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals? It seems his worldview is much needed there.

<comment><USER2> Posner has been a Judge on the Court of Appeals since 1981, on the 7th circuit. SCOTUS was never in the cards for him. He's an intellectual giant, but he's been on record for a long time in favor of the legalization of marijuana and hard drugs.

<comment><USER8> I was asking specifically about this from the article "And Posner's seat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals doesn't give him a direct role in shaping patent policy because (as we discussed yesterday) the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has exclusive jurisdiction over patent appeals. Posner was able to hear the Apple v. Motorola case because he was temporarily sitting in as a trial judge."

<comment><USER2> Ah I see. I'm not aware of an instance of an appellate judge moving to another circuit. I suppose technically the President could nominate him. I actually dislike that the Federal Circuit gets all patent cases. The end result in no circuit splits and SCOTUS ends up hearing a lot less patent cases than it should.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Y'all might find Posner's recent battle of words with Scalia interesting: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-segall/scalia- posner_b_18...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-segall/scalia- posner_b_1883750.html)

Two of the sharpest wits in the judiciary those two.

</comment><comment><USER9> The original blog post is one of a pair of related posts by Gary Becker and Steve Posner. The other was discussed at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4595153>.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can someone elaborate on what he means with this line:

"But the conditions that make patent protection essential in the pharmaceutical industry are absent."

<comment><USER9> The characteristic of the pharmaceutical industry that is usually cited as making patents essential is that it costs an average of $150 million to get a new drug through FDA approval. Without the temporary exclusion that patents provide, there would be no way to recoup this cost.

I am firmly of the opinion that patents are used for this because no legal alternative has been provided. But it is easy to imagine a more targeted property right for this case that would serve the same purpose as patents, except more efficiently. And my standard example of an inefficiency of the current situation is that there is good evidence that hookworm is an effective treatment for Crohn's disease, but since hookworm is not patentable, there is no prospect that this treatment will ever get evaluated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'll be the first to admit that although little good ever comes from Chicago, this guy has the right idea.

</comment><comment><USER12> CGI version to make the story more amusing [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlg9zMvLFwk&feature=plcp](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlg9zMvLFwk&feature=plcp)</comment>


SimCity Offline Is Coming - <AUTHOR> http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-offline-is-coming <comment><USER2> I'm _still_ playing and enjoying SC4k. There's tons of people who love SC3k, and even 2k. I pretty much exhausted all I care to do with this new SC inside of 2 weeks and uninstalled it. It's easily the worst city sim game I've ever played. And not just because of the issues with the AI and city size and all that. It just has no _joy_ in it.

This is what happens when the marketing department takes over a company.

(I would have been perfectly happy with SC4k with curved roads, mixed-use zoning and a few fixes for highways and such).

<comment><USER3> It'd be so wonderful to have a SC4.5k. Or, hell, could you imagine what the modding community could do with the source? No chance in hell of that ever happening, but one can dream...

<comment><USER4> Existential quandary here, but I loathe how we are now hitting the 20 year mark on the modern PC gaming era. 1993 opened the floodgates with Doom, and we are already seeing the loss of many games from that era that just don't run on a modern computer but have never seen a source release to let anyone update the engines.

And it only is poised to get worse over time, especially now that ARM is superseding x86 for a lot of computing. Is it reasonable to expect everyone to know how to run VMs of old operating systems (where you are already in questionable legal water if you download isos of, say, Windows 98, which is no longer available for money but still is copyrighted forever).

And titles like "Baldurs Gate Enhanced Edition" I feel hurt the industry hugely by presenting the legal departments an excuse to deny source release, because later on they could touch the game up for a few weeks and sell it all over again. Same way companies like Square will re-release 20 year old games like Final Fantasy rather than do source releases on the original engine code. Except for most games they won't see a re-release, and they will just drift into the binary purgatory of unrunnable titles.

<comment><USER5> I agree.

We expect English Students to study classic texts. It is hard to impossible (especially with legal considerations) for programmers to play the classics, let alone investigate the source code.

It is a very great shame that so much is effectively locked away and going to be lost.

<comment><USER6> The original SimCity Classic source code is open source, and instructors like Chaim Gingold and Mark Sample are actually having their students study (and deconstruct) the source code:

Chaim Gingold, Simulation for Games: [http://classes.soe.ucsc.edu/cmps179/Spring13/](http://classes.soe.ucsc.edu/cmps179/Spring13/)

Mark Sample, Criminal Code: The Procedural Logic of Crime in Videogames: [http://www.samplereality.com/2011/01/14/criminal-code-the- pr...](http://www.samplereality.com/2011/01/14/criminal-code-the-procedural- logic-of-crime-in-videogames/)

<comment><USER7> Prince of Persia's source is also available... [https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple- II](https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> EA, desperately trying to force life in to a product they did not understand and now attempting to recover the large part of their fan base they alienated.

Not going in to the rant, there were many around the time this PoS hit the market. All I can say is, as an avid sim city player, Sim city 4 had it. This new thing called Sim City, was more a city based sims level. I was just waiting for the "sim City delux edition where you could get +5 more houses, and some new cars"

Honestly I used to love sim City, but after spending £50 on sim city, it really is (and i said this before sim city) the last EA game i buy.

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me

<comment><USER9> fool me consistently for a decade or two... why aren't more people boycotting EA yet?

<comment><USER10> Because many of the games they publish are quite good? Just in games that are current, AC4: Black Flag and BF4.

<comment><USER11> AC is a Ubisoft product and BF4 has been so screwed up that investors are exhibiting enough concerns that the team for BF has moved from working on ANY dlc, to fixing the immediate issues that BF4 shipped with. Not to mention they trashed the most recent C&C because it was terrible.

<comment><USER12> I know that I pre-ordered BF4 and have yet to play more than a couple of hours since launch. How much have things improved since then? Has the CPU parking issue been fixed? It's silly that I have to run some third-party CPU utility to make the game playable.

<comment><USER13> I haven't heard of any CPU-related issues, but the current patches are sort of in a "two steps forward, one step back" tango. Some major thing would get fixed that breaks a myriad of smaller things, which would get fixed in the next patch that would then break some other minor things...

It's also taken a frustratingly long time to patch major game-breaking issues - the main one I kept running into was getting the "accept revive yes/no?" prompt when you die, which you can then not get out of short of quitting the game entirely.

They also managed to break SLI support completely during a recent patch. Like, completely. SLI users would have their screens turn into a flashing disco- tron.

Client crashes are still an issue, but a lot less common than before. Server crashes are likewise still an issue, but a lot less common than before. The general stability of Battlelog seems improved also - right now the general crashi-ness situation resembles what the game _should have_ looked like at launch.

<comment> shawn-furyan As a Texan, I can tell you that "two steps forward, one step back" is a two- step, not a tango :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So much for all the excuses about needing the cloud to run the simulation engine, etc

<comment><USER15> Chances are those excuses were true considering it took them nearly 8 months to release an offline patch that pretty much every SimCity fan immediately wanted upon (and prior to) release of the game.

<comment><USER16> doubt it; their solutions from earlier bugs included such gems as disabling the fastest play speed in order to improve stability.

I wouldn't give EA the benefit of the doubt about an 8 month patch. They probably began work on it late last week. The company has shown time and time again that they don't give a fuck about you -- the offline patch is just the minimum amount of work they have to do in order to unplug the servers on a new game without total outrage.

"Look, we pushed an offline patch before terminating the servers, WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM A GAME LESS THAN A YEAR OLD!?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was a lock to give them my money - and that's extremely rare for me to be committed to buy a game. But their delayed Mac version, the botched launch of their PC version, and the outright lies from their executives changed all of that. I've moved on.

<comment><USER6> I think Origin deserves the blame for making bad decisions and forcing them on Maxis, and I feel sorry that it was Maxis's job to repeat the lies they were told to say, because they didn't agree with the bad decisions (i.e. offline play, and needing more servers for launch), but it was their job to take the credibility hit, while Origin got to have their way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd be interested to see the data of how Simcity sales did averaging out past the launch date compared to other sim city games. Or, since it's all online, a view of active players past the first few weeks of play.

I know I bought it because the articles about the game failed to mention the size issues or any of the faulty AI issues (like traffic). I was amazed the reviewers didn't find any of those faults because they happened pretty fast and ruined the game for me.

Offline or not, Simcity was a huge step back for me and not worth all the hype it got.

<comment><USER19> They sold 1.1 million copies in its first two weeks, and around 2 million copies in total.

Compared to Sim city 3k/4k, that is less than half the sale numbers in a growing industry. I would also guess that Sim city 2013 had a much higher production cost, server costs, administration cost and support costs.

And most wonderful thing, they can't blame pirates.

<comment><USER17> Worse for them - though they'll continue to have some new sales, the initial spike is over, and the costs of maintaining their online infrastructure will continue to eat into any sales revenue for as long as they keep it active.

Makes you wonder how big a margin there is between sales revenue and ongoing costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The damage is done, and if they actively enforce their modding rules, specifically:

"Mods may not modify any .com, .exe, .dll, .so or other executable files."

Then what's the point? The game is still awful, and the means to fix that aren't available.

</comment><comment><USER21> The servers/DRM ended up being one of the least of this game's problems. Tiny plot size and oversimplification of the engine made this beautiful game basically no fun.

</comment><comment><USER22> File under: "breaking news from 1989" :)

<comment><USER23> It's cool if they're responding to the user base and meeting the demand. It's not cool if they're unveiling this like a feature sans apology for prior behavior.

They're restoring original, sane functionality. The GM should be expecting relief/forgiveness, not excitement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's amazing how close this iteration has followed in the path of the original Cities XL.

Take for example the Sim City world: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3oFKhftK88](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3oFKhftK88)

If you didn't play the Cities XL beta nor were around for the first bit of Cities XL there was something called the "Planet Offer". The world map Maxis shows 12 seconds into the trailer looks just like the Planet Offer's globe. Maxis even shows a commodities market at 22 seconds which looks like the Planet Offer's trading.

Just like the Planet Offer things did not work out as planned. Core components of the city builder were left undone such as the terrain manipulation or map creation. In part I suspect both were business decisions made to allow a DLC market.

From the beginning EA promised DLC. In the case of Cities XL the DLC was less obvious. The way things worked out the developers of Cities XL went bankrupt and the game was bought out by its current publisher. Every Cities XL game since has just been the original edition plus some extra maps and buildings.

The real shame is that both Cities XL and Sim City 2013 were beautiful and did not lack anything art wise. Instead they just failed at game play. Part of said problem was crippling the game to open DLC avenues. The other part was horrible balancing.

In the case of Cities XL there was no balancing. Every city service cost the exact same with no room to adjust service level like in Sim City 4. Cities XL also made the mistake of tying medium and large density zones plus most services to your city's population. In effect every new city felt the same since you had to bootstrap everything every-time. Of course finances were also dead easy to balance.

During Cities XL beta my biggest problem was opening enough inter-city transport capacity to export my over supply of office services. For a while I could just open international airports one after the other but I soon ran out of space. My city got so big I triggered a rare bug where the game replaced my entire city with a hilly field. Since said hilly field had no export routes I couldn't rebuild. This was a shame since the glitch managed to delete everything which was costing me money but leave all the export revenue. Thus despite being a hilly field I must have amassed more money than any other city during beta.

Sorry back on topic: just like Cities XL's planet offer Maxis is now stepping back from the online. In theory online would be fantastic but first you need to make a fun city builder. Maybe in the future we'll get one.

<comment><USER25> What surprises me is that they didn't realize that SimCity doesn't have the right game mechanics for classic DLC.

Instead of going the DLC route, they should have gone the user-gernerated content route. Allowing users to not only share and rank their cities but also to create additional content (3D models, conversions) and to interact with the game mechanics using an in-game scripting language.

By that last part I mean things like programming the logic of the in-game traffic lights, train schedules, and so on.

Pure, raw, script-based micro-management.

Had they managed to implement a game incorporating content-sharing, they might have seen the sales of their core game skyrocket, fueled by the positive marketing feedback of a content-generating community.

<comment><USER5> Someone needs to write a short essay about the power of user generated content to sell product.

Doom was released as shareware. You got the first few levels for free. You paid and got the rest. Doom had a huge amount of user generated content, but the community was careful to make sure it would only work if you had the full paid version of the game. Obviously some people didn't, but you'll always get pirates. That's an early example of the community protecting the ip while helping to boost sales.

Minecraft is a more modern example of user generated content driving huge sales of a game.

We just need a short easy to read essay to point the accountants and suits at.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely. I believe that's the reason behind the success of The Sims (and the lack of user generated content was the reason behind the failure of The Sims Online).

A browser based version of SimCity Classic could use WebGL to render the buildings with digital bricks (i.e. Legos). Then it would be very fun and easy for players to create their own buildings with existing tools (or new browser based tools build into the game), and even construct those buildings in the real world out of Legos.

There is an active community of Lego fans and a rich ecosystem of open source digital brick editing tools, and Lego Digital Designer even imports and exports some of the file formats that were developed by the open source community, as well as Lego's own xml file format. [http://ldd.lego.com/](http://ldd.lego.com/)

In fact there's already an open source JavaScript/WebGL/three.js library for rendering digital bricks: [https://bitbucket.org/msx80/brigl](https://bitbucket.org/msx80/brigl) demos: [http://www.lugato.net/brigl/index.html](http://www.lugato.net/brigl/index.html)

Check out the Lego Micropolis Micro City Standard: [http://twinlug.com/micropolis-micro-city- standard/](http://twinlug.com/micropolis-micro-city-standard/) and the beautiful stuff people have made: [http://flickrhivemind.net/Tags/micropolis/Interesting](http://flickrhivemind.net/Tags/micropolis/Interesting)

Bad day for Micropolis contest: [http://www.reasonablyclever.com/lego/contest/badday/](http://www.reasonablyclever.com/lego/contest/badday/) winners: [http://www.reasonablyclever.com/lego/contest/badday/badday.h...](http://www.reasonablyclever.com/lego/contest/badday/badday.html) [http://www.reasonablyclever.com/lego/contest/badday/basic.ht...](http://www.reasonablyclever.com/lego/contest/badday/basic.html) [http://www.reasonablyclever.com/lego/contest/badday/double.h...](http://www.reasonablyclever.com/lego/contest/badday/double.html) [http://www.reasonablyclever.com/lego/contest/badday/doublepl...](http://www.reasonablyclever.com/lego/contest/badday/doubleplus.html)

Imagine importing that great stuff into SimCity, or rather, the open source version of SimCity, whose name also just happens to be Micropolis: [https://code.google.com/p/micropolis/](https://code.google.com/p/micropolis/)

I'd write a short essay, but I'm afraid it would end up being a long essay! ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Will we get an apology for being so obstinate and narrow-minded, too?

How about a promise to never again shove always-on down the throats of their customers, and admit that it's a fruitless effort to exert absolute control over the ways users play their games?

How about Blizzard and Diablo 3, where you feel lag in a game that's predominantly single player?

</comment><comment><USER27> My understanding is that SCO was designed and balanced around player-player interaction between cities, to the point that a single free-standing city couldn't really be "complete." Cities functioned better when they were specialized and interacting with neighbors, than when they tried to be self- sufficient. I didn't play the thing myself, but that's how the devs seemed to portray things.

Given that (and other ways in which the online-ness was pervasive in game design), this seems like the epitome of a band-aid fix on a bullet wound. Just inserting an offline mode won't make the game better, because the game design was based around online play from a very fundamental level, and it's not a feature that can be removed simply. I.e., 'you can take SCO offline, but you can't take the online out of SCO.'

<comment><USER2> That's partially true. But the online plays was screwed from the start since you simply couldn't delete cities. So that city you built when you were screwing around with the build tools and made a giant happy face out of the roads and didn't really have any intention of making it self-sustaining _or_ part of a larger region play? It's there forever.

SC4k _also_ had region play, cities weren't really as effective until they were part of a region. The mechanic should have been to let you and some friends start a region, each pick a zone or two and start cooperatively developing them over time. Enhance things like cross-city usage fees (so I can recoup cost for putting up a huge airport in my city that my friends use) and it would have completely satisfied the multi-player requirement.

What you ended up with was a bunch of half-asses cities that nobody wanted to play with in regions that nobody wanted to be multi-players in, that the only benefit was regional construction projects that never really worked right and had cryptic requirements in order to construct.

Coupled with impossibly small city sizes and broken AI and the game is fundamentally broken in ways that no amount of patching or fixing is ever going to solve. Time to deep six this failed experiment and move on to Sim City 2.

<comment><USER28> Hey, that actually sounds a lot like regional planning in real life :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Well, the harm is already done, but it's good to see Offline mode coming.

But, to me, the most interesting news is the mod support. If you want to at least double your game's lifetime, make it easy to modify.

<comment><USER30> See Skyrim as an example for a successful modding culture. The community is just awesome.

<comment><USER31> And the complete Skyrim game (all expansions/DLC) still sells for $60 on PC, two years after release. People still buy it at this price, and it's still a pretty good value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Too bad I returned my purchase to Amazon after I was unable to play during the first week.

Corporate Execs from companies like EA and even Microsoft/Xbone are ruining gaming.

<comment><USER33> Don't feel bad about returning your game, the game is still horribly broken in many ways that an offline mode won't fix.

<comment><USER32> Mostly I feel bad for Amazon more than Maxis/EA. They probably ate the cost of the game just to satisfy me and a bunch of other people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> RE: offline play & non-mod modding:

       Too little, too late.

</comment><comment><USER6> Serious question:

Would anyone be interested in a version of SimCity Classic that ran in the browser? (Playable offline, of course!)

In what ways do you think it could be brought up to date with modern technology, without spoiling the fun of the original game?

What do you like about the original SimCity Classic? And what do you think should be changed or added?

What I'd really appreciate is advice on how to fund the development. Kickstarter is out because I'm not in the United States, but I'm considering Indiegogo, but open to alternatives, especially ones focused on open source and educational software.

<comment><USER5> I used to play simcity classic on a hercules monitor.

I would like to play it in the browser.

Things I'd like to see:

Nice graphics. Doesn't have to be high res or anything, just nice. Perhaps allow tilesets to be used so the community could easily create and share tiles.

Easy laying of road and track. I remember the odd rubber banding of classic being a bit frustrating.

Some nice easy to use terrain editor.

Some social features? Allow more than one person to work on a terrain map at a time? (I understand this raises complexity significantly). Or Allow people to passively view the terrain and sent chat suggestions?

Have a free play version, and a well tested challenges version with a wide variety of challenges. Eg "last X years", "grow to Y size", "survive these disasters", "earn Z money" etc.

Have a way for me to pay you. I much prefer a single payment for full access rather than a freemium model. (Wait x hours to collect enough coins to build this road, or unlock coins for $x now!!" Would not be pleasant.

Hope these are some use!

<comment><USER6> I think the easiest way to lay road and track is to drive a road laying vehicle around: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkVBg_- OviI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkVBg_-OviI)

Definitely a terrain editor, plus more tweakable procedural terrain generation.

There are many interesting ways to support multiple players, beyond the "cooperative committee with god mode limited by unanimous voting on expensive things" approach I implemented with the X11/TCL/Tk version: [http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/SimCityNetDemo.mov](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/SimCityNetDemo.mov)

Your friends could fly helicopters around your city, reporting on problems, or just chatting with you as you drive your brick laying machine around to make roads.

Your enemies could fly drones around and turn your citizens into terrorists by bombing their wedding parties.

Your governor could conspire to cause terrible traffic jams by closing lanes on your bridges.

Deconstruct the god mode tool pallet into something more like Magic the Gathering cards, that have particular tailored zones, purposes and budgets that multiple players can win, trade and play.

The code must be open source, and the basic game free down download and play (online or off), but I'd like to think of a revenue model that will support the development of the game, as well as educational courseware (for free educational use).

I don't think many people would pay to download other people's cities, but maybe artists/architects could sell their buildings in an online real-estate (virtual-estate?) market like eBay.

I'm seeking advice and suggestions about how to fund the development and support running it! It's futile to pitch an educational game to a big publisher like EA, but Indiegogo may be a good route. Are there other alternatives focused on open source or educational software? I would really appreciate some mentoring and guidance from people experienced with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Offline? What a brilliant innovation! I can't believe nobody thought of that before.

</comment><comment><USER36> It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Oh wait... It was just the worst of times.

</comment><comment><USER37> Is Coming? Isn't it there for a long time already? SimCity 2000 etc...

</comment><comment><USER38> Why exactly are people willing to blame EA but not Maxis?

<comment><USER39> I don't think Maxis even exists as separate entity anymore. Aren't they just a small division within EA now? EA kept the brand name because Maxis used to be good, but it doesn't mean anything today.

<comment><USER6> Maxis has a separate studio in Emeryville (by Berkeley), where Spore and SimCity were developed. Maxis isn't exactly small, since The Sims franchise has been responsible for a large share of their profits: A few years ago EA reorganized into three parts, and The Sims division was one of them, but I don't know how they're organized now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Is it just me but simcity was the best game I played in 2013, maybe I am just new to the genre, but it was like playing video game for the first time.

<comment><USER41> It's just you. SimCity 4 / Rush Hour is widely regarded as better. Give it a try: [http://store.steampowered.com/app/24780/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/24780/)

Allow me to lift a review: "While you cannot build crazy windy roads, SimCity 4 is perfect for building a city with grid street plan and you'll get everything you didn't get in SimCity 2013: huge maps, multiple entrances, zoning lots, detailed statistics/graphs/budgets, multiple transportation options from subway, elevated train, freeway, toll gates... the list goes on."

Heck, I think even SimCity 3000 will give you more raw City to play with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'd be curious to know how many of the folks making such negative comments actually purchased and have played the game recently.

<comment><USER43> Purchased played. Uninstalled several time and reinstall after "updates". The game is just not up to SC4 standards. Once it was stable I could only be entertained for a little more than an hour and then there was nothing more to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Sweet, I might actually start playing this game again!

</comment><comment><USER45> now? after people have been playing it offline by hacking it since the second week it was release? incredible!

</comment><comment><USER46> Way too little, way too late.</comment>


Rust in an Instant - <AUTHOR> https://fnordig.de/2020/05/02/rust-in-an-instant/ <comment><USER2> People often mistake Rust's safety guarantees for a sandbox like JavaScript. "Safe" Rust code is still on the trusted side of the airtight hatchway[1], so hacks like that are a class of "arbitrary code execution leads to arbitrary code execution".

[1]: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060508-22/?p=31...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060508-22/?p=31283)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait, isn't this a soundness issue? Couldn't you, say, replace malloc with a safe function that always returned 0x4 [0], causing segfaults with no unsafe?

[0]: chosen by fair dice roll

EDIT: yep, [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues/28179](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/28179)

<comment><USER4> Calling platform functions are always unsafe. In the case of malloc, the standard library wraps calls using a safe interface. This assumes that malloc is implemented to spec because there's no good way to handle it otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A better title would have been "How to Override Standard Library Functions in Rust".

<comment><USER6> Or: "Rust user discovers the linker"

<comment><USER7> That's a really shitty comment. The author is a long term Rust contributor and has spent their time before on C-land a lot. Yes, he knows how a linker works. Others don't.

He took his time to write down something, because some beginners asked him on Twitter.

Someone posts it on Hacker News and you shit over it like this.

If the post is too mundane for you, so be it. You're not the audience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I this didn't lead to a "duplicate method definition" error by the linker. The more typical way I know for mocking/intercepting OS functions is using the -Wl,--wrap=clock_gettime linker flags [1] which allow to redirect calls to a __wrap_clock_gettime functions. But that doesn't seem to have been necessary here.

[1] [https://drewdevault.com/2016/07/19/Using-Wl-wrap-for- mocking...](https://drewdevault.com/2016/07/19/Using-Wl-wrap-for-mocking- in-C.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> I get that Rust is a promising language, but for the love of god, out of the top ten articles on HN's main page 5 are about Rust.

Rust is not the only thing I come here for.

<comment><USER10> I remember reading it was everyone's favorite weekend language. There's certainly more people using it over the weekend than using it professionally. Maybe that's why there's so much of here today.</comment></comment>


On Foreman and Procfiles - <AUTHOR> http://avalonstar.com/journal/2012/jan/01/on-foreman-and-procfiles/

<comment><USER2> Agreed - I have a similar process which I documented on my blog:

[http://rwilcox.tumblr.com/post/12034393163/using-foreman- to-...](http://rwilcox.tumblr.com/post/12034393163/using-foreman-to-manage- your-development-only)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hah, This is the first time I hears about Foreman (been away from Rails for 1.5 years), but I'm so glad to see process management for development has gotten fixed! In the past, I even wrote an OS X application for managing the running processes, watching stdout, etc. - but as homemade things go, it never was 100% perfect, kept dropping state, forgot how to scroll nicely (one of the problems you face there is that you end up reimplementing a tty).

Foreman seems quite smart, as complete as (if not better than) my old app - and it's configurable, too! Goodbye Soupsie.app, hello foreman (-:</comment>


POCSAG and FLEX pager reception and decoding - <AUTHOR> http://bradthx.blogspot.com/2009/05/pocsag-and-flex-pager-reception-and.html <comment><USER2> It would be interesting if someone started forwarding these to Twitter.</comment>


Snowden's disclosures about NSA spying had a scary effect on free speech - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/27/new-study-snowdens-disclosures-about-nsa-spying-had-a-scary-effect-on-free-speech/ <comment><USER2> Am I fscked by commenting on this article!?</comment>


Coffitivity - <AUTHOR> http://coffitivity.com/

<comment><USER2> This was posted 20 hours ago[1], and had a decent discussion.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5325012>

</comment><comment><USER3> wow, I gotta try this!

</comment><comment><USER4> sounds legit...</comment>


DNA Sequence Reconstituted from Water Memory? - <AUTHOR> http://www.i-sis.org.uk/DNA_sequence_reconstituted_from_Water_Memory.php <comment><USER2> This dates from 2011 so by tradition should have a [2011].

Second, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier#Research_on_ele...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier#Research_on_electromagnetic_signals_from_DNA) :

> The paper has been met with harsh criticism for not being peer-reviewed, and > its claims unsubstantiated by modern mainstream conventions of physics and > chemistry. No third party has been able to replicate the findings as of > March 2015. In response to Montagnier's statement that the generally > unfavorable response is due to the "non-understanding or misunderstanding of > the breakthrough findings", columnist Andy Lewis has written that he has > found it difficult to assert what the paper "actually claims" and that "The > paper [...] lacks any rigour. [...]", as "important experimental steps are > described dismissively in a sentence and little attempt is made to describe > the detail of the work".[23]</comment>


Twitter traffic mentioning Benghazi has exploded – 612356 tweets in ~44 hours - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1212629751787085824 <comment><USER2> I'm not sure why this is here, but what I found most interesting about this is the depth of the nested "fake news" or propagandistic distortion it represents. The reason Benghazi is being retweeted so much is because Democrats are trying to associate the Iranian action against the Baghdad embassy as "Trump's Benghazi" in an effort to make an attack against him by means of trying to turn Benghazi against him (Alinsky tactics 101), while also deflecting and polluting what happened in the Benghazi incident.

What this "twitter storm" really represents that most people have seemingly not yet come to understand, is that it is a skirmish or battle in a new generation of warfare for the "hearts and minds" of the unaware masses of "voters".

War used to mostly be about log lines and materiel and throwing men against each other to die for the ruling class, but in the psychological warfare battlefield of the nuclear world of {current_year}, it's all about moving the minds of the masses of "democratic voters". The new weapons are volleys of deflection and gaslighting that will commence until regular people can't make heads from tails anymore and they basically go insane and can easily be moved and herded by a global ruling class to serve their interests, as we have increasingly been witnessing over the last few years. It's an effect caused by even the most "educated" people not being able to make rational, observable sense of, integrate or reconcile things anymore as effects are so pervasive now that they have caused the willful deconstruction of the very foundation of logic, order, and structure itself; mass gaslighting.

Everything has become intentionally more noise than signal to evade and provide cover while also destroying from within by those whose aim is precisely that, destruction from within.</comment>


The (humorous) dangers of Google's new deep search - <AUTHOR>

I was reading the Slashdot article on Google's new "deep search" (http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/04/16/2052206.shtml) where it submits forms and sees what the results are. This is a quite insightful and interesting anecdote one user posted:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=525058&cid=23096424
When I interned at Google, someone told me a funny anecdote about a guy who emailed their tech support insisting that the Google crawler had deleted his web site. At first, I think he was told that "Just because we download a copy of your site, doesn't mean your local copy is gone." (a'la obligatory bash [bash.org].) But, the guy insisted, and finally they double checked and his site was in fact gone. Turns out that it was a home-brewed wiki-style site, and each page had a "delete" button. The only problem was, the "delete" button sent its query via GET, not POST, and so the Google spider happily followed those links one-by-one and deleted the poor guy's entire site. The Google guys were feeling charitable and so they sent him a backup of his site, but told him he wouldn't be so lucky the next time, and he should change any forms that make changes to POSTs -- GETs are only for queries.
So, long story short, I wonder how Google will avoid more of this kind of problem if they're really going off the deep end and submitting random data on random forms on the web. Like the above guy, people may not design their site with such a spider in mind, and despite their lack of foresight this could kill a lot of goodwill if done improperly. <comment><USER2> Very funny anecdote. What bothers me though is that this implies that Google seems to think they own the web.

For example, they told the guy that he was lucky that they were willing to give him a backup, but it seems to me that Google's the one that should be taking responsibility for their actions.

Its a short jump from, "you have to use POST or we'll delete your stuff" to "you have to follow Google standard X or we won't index your site."

Welcome to the first web empire.

<comment><USER3> No, any web crawler would have done the same thing. It is simply an error to modify content with a GET.

<comment><USER2> Yes, it is an error. What alarms me is Google's attitude.

What happens when we're dealing with interfaces that are a little bit more ill-defined? Will Google continue to demand that you follow their way of doing things?

Google's attitude in this case suggests they will.

<comment><USER4> It's not "their way of doing things", it is just the way the web works (per HTTP spec). Any crawler would have done the same thing in that situation -- that fact that it happened to be Google is merely coincidental. Given the scale at which they operate, you can't expect Google or any other web-scale crawler to be mind-readers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In a way Google is doing QA on the whole web. This will expose all kinds of bugs sites have hidden behind their form-processing scripts. Databases will get filled up with random junk ('Google was here'), but that is also good for QA. On the other hand, a lot of that junk data will be reflected back to the web by sites which post this stuff.. not so good for the SNR of the Internet as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've seen the same thing happen with a rails app a co-worker created and populated with data for a demo/tutorial. It got indexed by the university's web crawler overnight and was empty the next day.

</comment><comment><USER7> Oh man, THAT is awesome! ....Backing up my site now :-P

</comment><comment><USER8> I they will only use drop downs, thus most don't contain such harsh options. I want to hear a good case of getting behind those forms... if they do enter data into boxes, they will do it off a dictionary list that is certified safe ..

\- Sites still use drop down nav? (is that a case?)</comment>


IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-30/ibm-names-arvind-krishna-as-ceo-rometty-to-retire-at-year-s-end <comment><USER2> From the CNBC article covering this: [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/30/ibm-ceo- ginni-rometty-steps-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/30/ibm-ceo-ginni- rometty-steps-down-arvind-krishna-to-take-over.html)

>In a release, Rometty described Krishna as a "brilliant technologist who has played a significant role in developing our key technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud, quantum computing and blockchain"

Sounds like IBM's strategy is going all in on buzzwords.

<comment><USER3> IBM is a consulting company that tries to sell some of their cloud to their clients and some of their buzzwords to their investors. Normal silicon valley stuff, except that IBM manages to show up with some positive cash flow at the end of the day, unlike modern VC darlings.

<comment><USER4> > except that IBM manages to show up with some positive cash flow at the end > of the day, unlike modern VC darlings

Comparing IBM to a VC funded startup doesn't make any sense to me. Big old tech companies (like IBM) in Silicon Valley mostly do turn a profit, some quite a bit more than IBM.

<comment><USER3> True. A fun fact: most also turned profit pre-IPO. Look up old S-1's.

I was just joking about the buzzword mumbo jumbo. I want someone to take me for an AI ride in a self driving cloud. I already had so many social network and Uber-for-X rides, those days were cool.

Does your mom do fintech, too? That's sooo cool!

<comment><USER4> Heh, I actually agree with you on the buzzword mumbo jumbo. There's no doubt IBM can throw out meaningless buzzwordy phrases with SV's best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another Indian-born tech CEO? It's incredible. IBM joins Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Nokia, and Harman in this regard. Also, MasterCard and PepsiCo (until 2018). I wonder how much it's a cultural thing.

<comment><USER6> This is a biased, but honest observation that I'd like to share. I've been working for a big corp for about 5 years now. I was born in a SE Asian country and came to the US for college. I have worked with a lot of India-born people.

As a fellow foreigner and as an Asian, I can tell that more often than not Indian people are bolder and more aggressive in asking for what they want (e.g., one of my Indian colleague asked for salary raise and the permission to go back to India in December for a month every year as part of his negotiation when he applied and got offer from another company; what he told me was simple, "It's my responsibility to ask. It's my boss' task to refuse or accept.") On top of that, some (not everyone; some are meek/introvert like myself). Because of their boldness, Indian people seem to be more successful at making themselves more visible, which is very important in corporate culture to get ahead. On top of that, some of them are pretty clever at courting favor of their superiors and/or playing office politics. I have seen quite a few of my peers/acquaintances from India who climbed corporate ladder pretty fast, so I'm not surprised they are doing well in terms of representation in C-level roles.

<comment><USER7> Don't forget the infamous in-group preferences they bring as soon as they take over.

<comment><USER6> You notice it as well. :) My division was managed by an Indian managing director, who succeeded a Caucasian boss prior 2018. Within 2 years of his arrival (and his departure for another company at the end of 2019), our department has the ratio of Indian to non-Indian ratio suddenly goes from around 20% to 70% (this increase in ratio accelerated because quite a few of the non-Indian people left in the past year).

The guy that I mentioned above who asked for one whole month of vacation also encouraged another Indian guy to do the same and they both took off last December to India while some team members from other projects were asked to cover for their absence by the ex-managing director. Worse, that guy also somehow convinced our management to hire his then-fiance in mid 2019 directly from India as a manager. I just can't believe how he pulled these off, but I have to give it to him for being really good at getting things done the way he wants them.

<comment><USER8> Good for him and good for you you can appreciate another man running his own show. I sometimes have the feeling a lot of guys are more jealous than women.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, not working with any insider knowledge (I work for Red Hat, but reading the news like everyone else), but the other news is that Jim Whitehurst is going to be the IBM President. Hopefully a big push in keeping Red Hat's culture relevant and influencing IBM to transform.

<comment><USER10> > Hopefully a big push in keeping Red Hat's culture

How would you describe RedHat culture?

<comment><USER9> I've been at Red Hat so long now (12 years) that it can be easy to take things for granted, but the biggest thing is just how open and transparent a company it is. There's not a lot of silo's or little kingdoms fighting each other, we're all generally working together.

For example, we're a fairly large company (10000+), but we still have an all company mailing list. And it is used by anyone to raise a concern, talk about an opportunity, etc. And that starts a conversation with anyone participating. I am on the Services side, but there is no barrier in place for me to reach out to anyone in the BU, Engineering, Marketing, whatever. I don't think I have ever had to pass a message up the chain of command for it to be passed down somewhere else, I'm just allowed to communicate when and how I need to.

The other way it comes out is that open-source has truly warped our way of thinking about things. For example, there's not a culture of restricting access to our own documents, team drives, etc. One of my peers was working on a new slide deck on a team drive, hadn't really shared it with anyone, then found out that one slide was copied into a presentation done by an EMEA team a day later. That kind of easy access and reuse is just _standard_. It applies to code, but also everything else we do.

I've worked with lots of clients through my job, and it is always eye opening when their employees are worried about "sticking out their neck" or otherwise rocking the boat. Or companies where a developer trying to talk to the business would be an incident with your manager giving you a talk. This is just completely foreign to anyone at Red Hat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It'll be interesting to see where the new CEO takes IBM and what his strategy is to make IBM relevant again. The last decade has been stagnant (if you're being nice) and abysmal (if you're being honest) for IBM, missing out on all the forecasted tech growth categories. Cloud services, they're never even in the discussion. Mobile - forget it. AI...maybe. They need to find a niche they can excel in, 1 least, in order to create the buzz needed to make them a relevant company again.

<comment><USER12> I'm not going to argue that IBM is currently healthy and performing as they should but they did have over $22 billion in cloud revenue for 2019 so they are evidently in the discussion somewhere.

<comment><USER13> Also couldn't they basically sit on their rear and collect on mainframe contracts from now until the end of time?

<comment><USER14> No. There's immense pressure on the mainframe market; there's a constant drumbeat of mainframe-killer tech that's _definitely_ better/faster/stronger (and, on rare occasions, is...at least for some narrowly defined workload). IBM has to work very hard keep mainframes competitive technology, and even harder at sales/marketing to fend off the alternatives.

<comment><USER15> What competitive technology are you thinking here? IBM z-series mainframe carry enormous amounts of transaction workloads today. They are deeply embedded in most of the Fortune 1000 companies. Hitachi was the only real competitor left standing and they dumped their mainframe business in 2017 since they were unable to get traction outside of Japan.

In the early 90's, there were efforts by customers to get rid of their mainframes which put IBM on the ropes then, until Lou Gerstner took over as CEO and stabilized the business. It's not like these transaction workloads can be easily ported elsewhere since some of them go back as far as the early 1970's. Those customers able to ditch their mainframes did so a while back. The rest of these systems will remain due to risks and costs of migrating to a suitable alternative. It's not a huge revenue stream for IBM, but a very profitable one.

<comment><USER16> But mainframe customers are still dumping them, and they're not picking IBM: [https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0121/sabre- and-...](https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0121/sabre-and-google- cloud-partnership/)

Note that SABRE is the OG enterprise app, by most measures it was _the_ first non-military/govt/research computer system, going live in 1960 (!) and the core still runs System/360 (which they had to migrate _to_ , not from!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good to see an engineer taking helm of the company from the previous CEOs which were from sales.

Maybe we'll have a renaissance like what Satya did to Microsoft...

<comment><USER18> Satya wasn't an engineer at microsoft.

<comment><USER19> > Satya wasn't an engineer at microsoft.

This is true, strictly speaking. But (also strictly speaking) he was an engineer

> Nadella attended the Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet[7] before receiving a > bachelor's in electrical engineering[8] from the Manipal Institute of > Technology (then part of Mangalore University) in Karnataka in 1988.[9][10] > Nadella subsequently traveled to the U.S. to study for an M.S. in computer > science at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee,[11][12] receiving his > degree in 1990.[13] Later, he received an MBA from the University of Chicago > Booth School of Business.[14]

([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella))

And that's all GP said.

> Good to see an engineer taking helm of the company from the previous CEOs > which were from sales.

<comment><USER20> Nadella was a Program Manager at Microsoft.

<comment><USER19> And? He started as an engineer. GP didn't say he had to be an engineer at his current company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >[New CEO] Krishna is currently the head of IBM's cloud and cognitive software unit and was a principal architect of the company's purchase of Red Hat

All-in with that then.

</comment><comment><USER22> What's the difference between the President and CEO roles?

<comment><USER23> In at least some cases, the CEO is the one actually running things, and the President is the one whose job is to fire the CEO if they're screwing up. Not that it is put that way, of course.

<comment><USER24> > President is the one whose job is to fire the CEO if they're screwing up.

I assumed the Chairman of the Board would fill that role?

President sounds to me like a step below CEO, but I know very little about corporate structuring...

<comment><USER23> Depends on the company, but it is not uncommon for the President and Chairman of the Board to be the same person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> IBM's Ballmer finally stepping out.

Hopefully IBM's Nadella is coming in!

</comment><comment><USER26> Krishna is always shown in blue, so it seems the obvious choice ;-)

</comment><comment><USER27> Old timers talked about IBM the way people used to talk about Microsoft in the 90s and Google in the 2000s. The new CEO being someone who's been there his entire working life does not sound like a recipe for success.

</comment><comment><USER28> Doesn't matter what his ethnicity is, if he doesn't produce (whatever that definition is: stock price, technology output, new market etc.) he'll be kicked out. At the CEO level, nepotism does not work (unless he has a golden parachute, does he?). Why the hell will he hire his "buddies" who are not productive?

So comparing him to low-mid level Indian managers who are fighting over scraps is comparing apples to oranges.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is IBM even relevant anymore or are they simply another McKinsey type consulting firm Who happens to sell mainframes to banks?

<comment><USER30> if generating 80 billion in revenue and making your shareholders money by selling mainframes to banks is irrelevant then I wouldn't want to be relevant.

I continue to be puzzled by the derision that companies on this site get just because they do regular business.

<comment><USER31> They do that much because they are the incumbent. So they make that kind of money despite how shitty they are.

Technology/engineering/Moore's law can paper over a lot of dumb institutional inefficiency.

Also, just to be clear. It's very hard to do much better, big groups are hard to keep nimble, honest, agile, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> My bet was on Jim Whitehurst.

<comment><USER33> That was surely most Red Hatters' dream, but Arvind Krishna as CEO is probably the best possible outcome for Red Hat among the realistic ones (not counting that Whitehurst will be President, while Ginny Rometty was President and CEO).

Arvind Krishna was "Jim Whitehurst's boss" until now (Red Hat is under the IBM cloud division), and back when the acquisition was announced in 2018 he visited one of the Red Hat offices for a sort of "town hall" meeting. He almost unanimously made a very good impression, and he won over quite a few employees that at the time were skeptical about the acquisition.

<comment><USER34> > Arvind Krishna was "Jim Whitehurst's boss" until now

Not true. Jim (and Red Hat under him) reported directly to Ginni. Red Hat was under IBM cloud for revenue reporting, though, but the distinction is material.

<comment><USER33> He reported to both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Reminds me of [https://archive.vn/UpV1Y](https://archive.vn/UpV1Y)

</comment><comment><USER36> Good for them that they have a technologist as the boss. Seems like the ascendancy of RedHat isn't a great sign. They are still in the audit business rather than the technology business.

</comment><comment><USER37> Can we derive anything meaningful from the fact that this Hacker News item almost gets no response and just a few comments?

<comment><USER38> I'll never forgive them for subjecting me to Clearcase or DOORS.

<comment><USER39> Clearcase was my first version control software. I don't think I'll ever experience such feelings of tranquil bliss and relief as when I learned and switched to git.

<comment><USER38> I was still using it at my previous employer that I left a few months ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> \---

<comment><USER41> I believe your severely underestimate the influence of regional culture.

<comment><USER40> \---

<comment><USER41> Something as localized as the culture in a family can have tremendous effect on people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I was expecting to see the Watson logo

<comment><USER43> Exactly. Don't be fooled by this clever marketing, we all know who's really pulling the strings behind the scenes...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_\(computer\))</comment></comment>


Stable Filtering – Part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0036 <comment><USER2> The following paper is excellent and not totally irrelevant:

[http://home.agh.edu.pl/~turcza/sr/Splitting%20the%20Unit%20D...](http://home.agh.edu.pl/~turcza/sr/Splitting%20the%20Unit%20Delay.pdf)

The effects you're describing (blurring, numerical stability) are readily formalized in DSP jargon. It's a shame this post didn't provoke more discussion here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Casey did mention that Fabian and cbloom know the math behind this and might elaborate on the topic on their own blogs later.</comment></comment>


Google, how old is the president? - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?q=how+old+is+the+president <comment><USER3> Can someone share what they're seeing? I'm not in the US and there isn't a knowledge card, which is what I think the Americans are seeing.

The first result on the page for me is:

 _List of Presidents of the United States by age - <USER2>

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_by_age) This is a list of presidents of the United States by age. The first table charts the age of each ... 55 years and 6 months, which is about how old Benjamin Harrison was at the time of his inauguration. ... The youngest living president is Barack Obama, born August 4, 1961 (age 700420517000000000056 years, 63 days)._

<comment><USER4> [https://i.stack.imgur.com/sgAN8.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sgAN8.png) Displays a snippet suggesting Barack Obama is 56 years old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.google.ca/search?dcr=0&q=how+old+is+the+presiden...](https://www.google.ca/search?dcr=0&q=how+old+is+the+president+of+the+united+states)

</comment><comment><USER6> I think Google is a little the victim of it's own success. They are never going to be as perfect as we expect on these answers

</comment><comment><USER7> "how old is the US president" gives the correct answer. Most other inputs don't try to return an exact value.

</comment><comment><USER8> FYI for transparency. I have informed the google search team of this undesirable search behavior.

I am a google employee within google cloud. So can't talk about why you see Obama instead of Trump but good catch.

</comment><comment><USER9> Lies we tell ourselves to get to sleep at night.

</comment><comment><USER10> What's the point?

<comment><USER11> That Google hasn't automated the process of inferring that the question was about the current president.

This generalizes to pretty much any official position.

<comment><USER12> During the last UK election they got 3 out of the 4 main party leaders wrong for searches about "general election 2017"</comment></comment></comment>


The Two-Napkin Protocol (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-two-napkin-protocol/ <comment><USER2> > BGP is still integral to an Internet that has grown from 80 thousand hosts > in 1989 to over one billion hosts today.

And at the same time, its security hadn't improved much:

[https://security.stackexchange.com/q/56069/15648](https://security.stackexchange.com/q/56069/15648)

</comment><comment><USER3> > It was 1989. Kirk Lougheed of Cisco and Yakov Rekhter of IBM were having > lunch in a meeting hall cafeteria at an Internet Engineering Task Force > (IETF) conference.

> They wrote a new routing protocol that became RFC (Request for Comment) > 1105, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), known to many as the "Two Napkin > Protocol" — in reference to the napkins they used to capture their thoughts.</comment>